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A worker at a warehouse for Amazon, one of the companies that has
helped changed how people think about political priorities. Getty
/ Matt Cardy

As unseemly waves of an increasingly ideological debate confront
parts of the European political elites, powered by fears of an
immigration crisis, I'd argue that political nationalism, as we
knew it, is diminishing in real and practical terms. Its killer
wasn’t one of the old ideological enemies - socialism or
communism or social democracy - it's the Internet, and the
borderless consumerism it has enabled.

World economic leaders gathered last week in Davos for the World
Economic Forum to muted reaction from anti-globalisation
activists who a short decade ago would have clogged the streets
in protest. Those days might be over in fact. The Internet’s
promise of cheap, global commerce has largely been realised, and
overwhelmingly, the new reality of consumerism is chosen over the
old debates.

Thanks to the Internet, new, easier and cheaper products can
compete on an essentially level playing field, released from the
old enemies of free markets like protectionism and monopoly.
We’ve seen it most recently in Australia with the emergence of
Uber – and with a Prime Minister committed to a new age of
Australian innovation, the next Uber is probably gestating in the
mind of an Australian entrepreneur right now.

There is a natural tension between protecting national interests
politically and a future in which those interests are subordinate
to an agile and effective global consumer market. Australia is
easing that tension by entering the fray directly, and daring to
imagine a future where Parramatta or Geelong might be the next
Santa Clara Valley of innovation.

Politicians can now only try to balance the scales between
national political and economic concerns and the way the
practical global market has muscled its way onto the screens and
into the (increasingly digital) wallets of consumers. Citizens -
or more importantly, voters – are already balancing their own
nationalistic urges with consumer concerns everyday.

A new sense of community

People today are more acutely aware of what they want than ever
before. Take cost of living concerns, or anxiety about
employment, or concerns about economic growth. There’s now a very
real social conscience; a communal, digitally-enabled empathy in
the way people express those worries today compared to decades
ago, when a person’s economic concerns would be specifically
personal. Individuals have been balancing competing needs for a
lot longer than our politicians, who seem to have only just woken
up to the fact the new online economies put them in a very
difficult position.

Take, for example, the recent debate on free trade at a
Commonwealth level. Opponents of the Free Trade Agreement
incorrectly predicted they were entering an ideological
battlefield with the same topography it had 30 years ago, when
Australians could be assumed to be reflexively against such a
move. But today’s Australian public understand the axis between
protectionism and the economic benefit of cheaper goods and
services much better than perhaps the trade unions and Australian
Labor Party gave them credit for. They now more swiftly compute
the balance between the political and the personal, weigh up the
cost-benefit ratio between national and private interests and
understand moderate economic reforms that are respectful of both.
Decision-makers do the public a tremendous disservice if they
don’t respect the fact their voters are so engaged.

In the UK, voters contemplating an exit from the EU are weighing
a similar set of competing interests. Conscientiousness of what
such a move means is acute - the UK public are in the unenviable
position of weighing their economic pride with the price of a
discount EasyJet ticket to a Spanish beach. That’s the level to
which the competing cases might reduce their campaign to, but the
truth is much more complex - and, to an engaged public, misses
the point completely.

The question of being in or out of the EU is arguably entirely
redundant when considered beside the new borderless consumerism.
The figuring of voters is that digital venture in San Francisco
doesn’t need a political debate about the efficacy of a
multi-billion dollar transnational regulatory body like the EU to
engage with the Australian market, so why does a Croatian firm
need one to do business in France? South African venture capital
flows to Israeli start-ups without a joint Parliament to
administer it. Tomorrow’s Turkish app-developers don’t need a
session of the Middle Eastern Union to sell their products in
Lebanon. To some the Brexit debate is a last century argument and
the outcome, vital to vested interests and ideologues, is
redundant to the next wave of innovators for whom political
borders are less important than digital ones.

Borders - physical ones - are blurring, but the anxiety that is
causing is sharp. In the United States tension over Latin
American immigration forces individuals to balance questions of
sovereignty with ones about labour costs and consumer benefits.
American legislators, the smart ones at least, are forced to
acknowledge that Latin economic migration has very real benefits
to the US economy, but at a cost to their capacity to "protect"
their boarders. Australian political thinkers are more familiar
than most with questions of border control, but the debates here
and that in the United States are not based on the same
predications.

A Californian voter staring in numb bewilderment at Donald
Trump’s latest "solution" to unregulated Latin American migration
understands that the potential illegal migrants Trump would lock
out with a wall are also a vital part of that state’s economic
prosperity. Again, politicians do their voters a disservice if
they don’t recognise the public is capable of understanding the
need for an axis between competing interests to be achieved.

No matter how big a wall you build to protect supposed national
interests, the Internet will find a way to break it down. A
Mexican woman finding irregular work as a cleaner across the
border can book a job online using a $20 cell phone and free
WiFi. American employers of illegal migrants can fill gaps in
their workforces skills using online training courses from
providers in still more countries.

Chattering commentators love buzzwords like "disruption" but that
massively understates the impact of what’s happening to the way
we do business and live our lives. It’s not disruption - it’s the
practical redundancy of an old political order; one predicated on
old power structures and old relationships between politicians
and the public and replaced with something more democratic and
much more representative.

If they’re not careful, and deeply respectful of those who elect
them, how politicians respond to this might not even be up them.
For Western democracies, the impact of ignoring these massive
consumer changes is even worse than revolution. It's irrelevance.